Laura Chenel

Laura Chenel (born in c. 1948–1949)^[1] is an American cheesemaker and the first commercial producer of goat cheese in America through an eponymous company. In 1979, she began producing a variety of goat cheese called chèvre in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Sebastopol, California. Chenel received her first large order in 1980 when Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, placed a standing order for her cheese. Waters listed the cheese as "Laura Chenel's Chèvre" in what is considered one of the first American instances of goat cheese salad, which provided Chenel with increased public awareness of her cheese.^[2] Eventually, Chenel’s operation expanded to sales of over two million pounds of cheese per year.^[3] The company primarily manufactures fresh chèvre, although aged cheeses make up roughly 10% of its business. In 2006, Chenel sold the company to the Rians Group, a French corporation that has acquired numerous small farming operations, while retaining ownership of her herd of five hundred goats.^[1]

In 1968, during her senior year of high school, Chenel went to the Netherlands as an exchange student. When she returned to the United States, she enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz to study anthropology. After a year at UC Santa Cruz, she moved to San Francisco, and then New York City in search of a “more urban environment.”^[4]

Chenel’s parents lived on a turkey ranch in Sebastopol and operated a restaurant on the adjacent property. In 1973 or 1974, Chenel returned from Manhattan to her parents’ property when her father, who was also a reading teacher at Rancho Cotati High School, was granted a sabbatical. During her parents’ absence while they traveled in Europe, she managed the family restaurant. Originally known as Vast’s Turkey Land and later renamed Gobbler’s Roosterant, the establishment specialized in smoked turkey and other meat products.

Chenel converted an enclosed area near the restaurant into a shelter for her first goats and used their milk to produce yogurt and kefir.^[5]

After expanding her herd, Chenel approached the Redwood Empire Dairy Goat Association (REDGA) with a proposal to produce cheese from surplus milk that would otherwise have been discarded. In collaboration with the association, she established a cooperative. She subsequently visited cheese retailers in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Berkeley to assess market requirements.

Chenel later met with members of the cooperative in a Safeway parking lot in Sonoma County, where she presented cans of milk from her goats. David Viviani of the Sonoma Cheese Factory used the milk to produce goat jack, a semi-soft cheese characterized by its creamy texture and mild, slightly sweet flavor.^[6][5] Chenel subsequently offered the goat jack for sale in the retail outlets she had previously contacted.^[6]

A clerk at the Say Cheese store in San Francisco’s Cole Street introduced Chenel to fresh French cheese, made from raw milk and coated in ash. Chenel preferred the flavor of the fresh French cheese to standard Jack cheese, which motivated her to look for someone who could teach her how to make it. She enrolled at Sonoma State University to study the French language for a year, where one of her professors, Adele Friedman, helped her write to Jean-Claude Le Jaouen, expressing her interest in learning how to make goat cheese. Le Jaouen was the head of the L'Institut Technique de l'Elevage Ovin et Caprin (ITOVIC), Paris, and the author of The Fabrication of Farmstead Goat Cheese (1990). He responded to Chenel’s request, saying that he could “help her find something” and asking her to “just show up.”^[5] In 1979, she spent three and a half months in France, apprenticing with four farmstead cheese-makers across Angoulême, Carcassonne, and Joigny.^[4]

Chenel returned from France with mold specimens from every place she had stayed. In 1979, she lived with her goats on Vine Hill Road in Sonoma County, a road close to the Dehlinger Winery. She set up the basement of her house to make cheese, but she was initially unsuccessful. "There were years of established bacteria there, more virulent than the natural cheese bacteria I was attempting to encourage," she explained.^[4] About a month and a half later, the microbial environment stabilized, and the cheese began to form the "correct taste and texture."^[4] She made ash-coated chabis and pyramids, as well as crottin from blue mold that became “very hard and dry.” She started selling her products at farmers' markets, but due to a lack of persistent market demand, she pivoted to experimenting with white mold. It was the eight-ounce chèvre that gained Chenel significant recognition after Alice Waters of Chez Panisse tried the cheese at a farmers' markets in 1981. She began ordering 50 pounds of chèvre a week for a salad recipe that included breaded and baked discs of Chenel's cheese on a bed of mesclun greens, which became a staple of the restaurant's menu.^[7][8][9] The same year, Chenel moved to Ridley Avenue in Santa Rosa, California where she converted a former food processing plant to make cheese. She spent the next twelve years at the Ridley factory and gave up her goats to focus on cheesemaking. “I had a certain absolute standard about what had to happen for them, and I was so into this cheese that I couldn’t do it,” she said.^[5][10]

Roberta Klugman, who worked with a distributor for Chenel in the 1980s and at a retail shop where Chenel's cheese was sold and, said that her goat cheese "was highly regarded alongside Montrachet." However, domestic goat cheese in America was still a hard sell. According to Klugman, there was a "great enthusiasm for supporting Californian and American producers, but for the most part, restaurants still wanted to stay with the French products."^[9] By the mid-1990s, goat cheese had grown in popularity, and Chenel's company started selling over 2 million pounds of cheese annually.^[9]

In 1993, Chenel moved back to Sonoma County and took over the former Clover-Stornetta Farms bottling plant to "boost production and consolidate her herd of goats."^[10] In 1995, she started with 12 goats, later adding 80 more from across Wyoming, South Dakota, and Idaho. The first goats of her new herd were Saanens. Eventually, she added more breeds, including Anglo-Nubians, Toggenburgers, Alpines, and American Lamanchas, growing her herd to 500 goats.^[4]

In October 2005, Chenel received a cold call from an intermediary hired by Hugues Triballat of Rians International in France. Triballat had been selling a few of his cheese products in America and wanted to further expand within the American market. Triballat and Chenel met two months later to discuss a potential sale. Though Chenel wasn't interested in selling when Rians first approached her, she was impressed by Triballat's "attention to quality and craft."^[10] Speaking about her motivation to sell, she stated it stemmed from feeling better suited to starting the business than scaling it, being "too hands-on," and experiencing the weight of her name being on the cheese. She also felt she had accomplished her goals and reached a point where she needed to step away.^[4]

The sale was finalized in 2006 for an undisclosed amount, with Rians purchasing all the vats, pasteurizers, packaging lines, and other equipment from Chenel's Stornetta plant. She retained her herd of 500 goats and sold their milk to Rians. Her team of 18 employees stayed on with the new owner, and Rians continued to lease the 15-acre former milk dairy and bottling plant owned by the Stornetta family until 2011.^[10] By 2023, in addition to buying goat milk from eight farms in California, Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho, Rians was looking to expand its dairy base to meet customer demands.^[11]

Chenel has been in a relationship with John Van Dyke, former cheesemaker and general manager of her company, since the late 1990s. As of 2007, she lived in the hills above Sonoma Valley and spent her time gardening and tending to her goat herd.^[4][1]

• List of cheesemakers

• Official website
• Article at epicurean.com